We want to allow people to take some of their Fallen London history into Sunless Sea. But we don’t want to make life cripplingly difficult for ourselves, and we don’t want to disadvantage people who haven’t played Fallen London. Here’s our current thinking. (Ed – this was current thinking in July 2013, and it did not work out this way in the finished game.)

When you begin a game of Sunless Sea, we’ll give you the option of connecting to Fallen London/StoryNexus for content updates and unlocks. (You never have to do this – you can just play the base content as shipped – and you don’t need an Internet connection to do anything but download new content. Sunless Sea is an offline experience.)

When you’re connecting to StoryNexus, we’ll check if you have a Fallen London character and ask if you want to base your new SS Captain on it. If you do, you can optionally import name, gender, portrait, and a limited number of pets and storylines – just the things that Sunless Sea knows about, and that aren’t unbalancing.

Note that ‘base on’. If you’re importing Fallen London character information, we’ll ask you if your Captain is your Fallen London character, or is actually their heir, child, sponsor, lover or adversary. This won’t have any substantial fictional effect – but it will tweak character generation and help you build your personal fiction. You may also find this feels more consistent if your Fallen-Lond0n-export Captain dies. And they probably will die. The Unterzee is, if you’ll excuse the classical reference, dark and full of terrors. But even that isn’t the end: see the post upcoming on Shipwreck, Death and Legacies…